Do Chinese characters have any special significance in Korea?

Korean ancient times have always been used in Chinese characters, learned from China in the past, but the pronunciation is Korean, the characters and sounds can not be linked, so it is difficult, there are many illiterates, the ancient royal family, King Sejong after knowing, borrowed from the world's existing writing, invented the current Korean characters, just like that, hee-hee.

Korean, or Korean, is mainly spoken in South Korea, North Korea, and ethnic Koreans in the People's Republic of China. It is considered by some scholars to belong to the Korean-Japanese-Ryukyuan language group of the Altaic language family, but others believe that it belongs to an isolated language. It is used by about 70 million people worldwide.

The Korean language is written with an alphabetic script (hangeul) and a hanja (hanja). Half of the vocabulary of Korean is the same as Chinese. Academically, the term Korean is more commonly used.

The Korean language used to use Chinese characters and now mainly uses the Korean alphabet hangul. It consists of 24 letters, 14 consonants and 10 vowels, and is made up of 2 to 5 syllables, which is different from the kanji of Chinese or the kanji of Japanese.

The dialects of the Korean language are divided into the following three main systems:

South Korean: It includes five sub-branches: Gyeonggi, Jeolla, Gyeongsang, Chungcheong, and Jeju, among which the Jeju dialect is quite different from other dialects. The main feature of the southern dialect is the beginning of the word"r"The tone becomes"n"and"y"sounds, as well as a large number of loanwords from Japanese and English.

North Korean: including Pyongan, Hwanghae, Hamgyong and other branches, the main feature is that the beginning of the word is retained"r"sounds, as well as a lot of old words. Chinese Korean:

China's Korean language is similar to the northern dialects, but retains more archaic features and more Chinese loanwords than the southern and northern dialects. In terms of phonetics, ethnic Koreans in China are accustomed to willing"wae"Read as"we"。

Korean is an adhesive language that relies mainly on changes in word endings to express its grammatical relationships, and it is a very expressive language. The grammatical structure is a subject-object-predicate (SOV) structure.

The reason why Korean characters are used in important occasions in Korea is that Korean used to use Chinese characters, but later gradually abandoned Chinese characters and switched to the current Korean language. Korea's national pride and patriotism are particularly strong due to its history of being invaded in modern times.

As a neighbor of China and a long-term vassal of China, Chinese culture.

It has a deep impact on South Korea. Whether it is customs, festivals, food, or education, it is inseparable from Chinese culture. This deep-rooted culture makes South Korea love and hate, and wants to discard but can't.

Topography of South Korea

South Korea is located on the Asian continent.

The northeastern part of the Korean Peninsula.

The southern half. It is surrounded by the sea on three sides: east, south and west.

Mountains make up about two-thirds of the Korean peninsula and the terrain is diverse, with low mountains, hills and plains intertwined. Low mountains and hills are mainly found in the central and eastern parts of the country, and are mostly below 500 meters above sea level. The Taebai Mountains run along the east coast and form the backbone of the peninsula's southern topography.

It to the Yellow Sea. Several parallel mountain ranges stretching out from the side form a low hilly area, including Taebaek Mountain Range, Gyeongsang Mountain Range, Xiaobai Mountain Range, etc., among which Seoraksan Mountain and Wutai Mountain.

and other peaks are known for their beautiful scenery. The highest peak of the Xiaobai Mountain Range from northeast to southwest is Jirisan Mountain.

1915 meters above sea level.

Hallasan Mountain is located on Jeju Island.

The center, at 1,950 meters above sea level, is the highest peak in Korea. In ancient times, it was said that there were gods who lived on Mt. Halla, so in the past, Mt. Halla was called Mt. Yingju, and it was known as one of the three sacred mountains along with Mt. Geumgang and Mt. Jiris.

The plains are mainly distributed in the south and west, and the altitude is mostly below 200 meters. There are plains such as the Hanjiang Plain and the Hunan Plain along the Yellow Sea, and the Gimhae Plain, Jeonnam Plain and other small plains along the coast of the South China Sea.

Hangul Hanja is a Chinese character used in Korea. Most of the vocabulary of Hangul Chinese was introduced from China. At the same time, many scientific and technical terms were imported into Western European languages such as English and German after the Meiji period to correspond to Japanese kanji compounds that were created in Japan.

For a long time, the Korean nation was a nation that had only a national language but no national script.

Around the 3rd century AD, Chinese characters were introduced to Korea, and later the pronunciation and meaning of Chinese characters were used to record the Korean language, that is, "official reading bun". But due to the influence of the hierarchical concept of feudal society. Most of the people who were able to learn and use Chinese characters were from the aristocratic class, and it was difficult for ordinary people to reach them.

In addition, some of the "official reading scripts" created by combining Chinese characters are not suitable for the phonetic system and grammatical structure of the Korean language, so it is sometimes difficult to accurately label the Korean language.

Related information

Although South Korea promulgated the Hangeul Act in 1948 to prohibit the public use of Chinese characters, the use of Chinese characters has not been completely stopped, and the use of Chinese characters has existed for a long time, whether it is in school language education or in the writing of the Chinese language. Policies on the use of Chinese characters in South Korean textbooks are also changing, such as the 1968 Decree of **, which called for the removal of Chinese characters from primary and secondary school textbooks.

However, in 1972, Chinese characters were made compulsory in junior high school and incorporated into the regular curriculum. In 1973, secondary school textbooks provided for the reintroduction of Chinese characters, and in 1995 they were made elective. In February 1999, Kim Dae-jung, then South Korea, signed a decree approving the use of Chinese characters in official documents and road signs.

The promulgation of this decree broke the ban on the use of Chinese characters in South Korea for more than 50 years. The Ministry of Education has promulgated 1,800 "new common Chinese characters" for education and 1,300 "commonly used Chinese characters" for daily life.

Hanja. Hanja, also known as Hangul Hanja or Hanja, is a Chinese character used in the Korean Chinese language, Hangul Hanja is commonly used to write Chinese characters imported from ancient China, and is not used frequently.

It can also be written in Hangul, and the education of kanji varies depending on the era, and there are many people who cannot read and write kanji, and the glyph of Hangul kanji is about the same as that of traditional Chinese characters in Japanese old fonts.

The phonetics of Chinese characters retain the phonetic system of Middle Ages, however, the rupture t is changed to the flow l, such as il, eight pal In Chinese, the double vowel becomes the short vowel e.g. ai and ae.

The pronunciation of Hangul in Korean changes depending on the position and the surrounding chapters, and there are some special rules for Chinese characters, such as the nasal n followed by the vowel i and the semivowel j at the beginning of the syllable.

For example:

The girl is sonyeo, and the girl is yeoja, and when l is at the beginning of the syllable, it becomes a nasal n, such as Paradise ragwon, nagwon, old man roin, noin.

When the initial rule is applied in front of the vowel i and semivowel j, the consonant falls off and only the vowels such as reason riyu, niyu, yu, travel ryeohaeng, nyeohaeng, yeohaeng are retained.

Many of the homophones in Han Chinese and Korean are derived from ancient Chinese words, and many of them have the same pronunciation, and if they are written in Hangul alone, they may not be able to grasp their meanings directly and accurately without context, or they may be misunderstood.

This is the main reason why the Korean Hanja Promoter advocates the revival of Chinese characters, taking the Korean word sudo as an example, the corresponding Chinese characters are Hangul Chinese characters on the left and Chinese explanations on the right.